PSoTD

I posted this last week at The Unpaid Punditry Corps. It's still timely this week, so now I'm posting here.

This post is about blogging. Summer blogging.

I’ve been building web sites for over 10 years, and keeping track of site traffic during the same time period. Over that time, I’ve learned a few things about web sites in general, and political sites in specific:

Web Site Traffic Goes Down in Summer, with RELATIVELY VERY FEW notable exceptions. There are seasonal exceptions - I’m sure waterslide attraction web sites see an increase in traffic during the summer.

But seasonal exceptions are a small minority and obvious.

Web site traffic goes down for lots of reasons during the Northern Hemispheric summer. College and high school kids are out of school for the season and spend less time in pursuit of sites on the web. People go on vacation. They spend time at the pool and the golf course and barbecues that run late into the night.

People spend summer living the life they spent the fall, winter and spring working towards. There are less eyeballs, and less time spent by those eyeballs, during the summer on the Web. And so… web site traffic diminishes... almost everywhere.

Bloggers, those of us that use statcounter and sitemeter and any other “traffic analysis” software, tend to look at our traffic. Who has visited our site? Any new links to our site? What blog posts are popular? Hey, we’re human, we want some sort of validation for the blogging effort we make, just as anyone else does in their personal endeavors.

Summer traffic numbers can be somewhat... wilting for bloggers. Traffic goes down for many, and may seem less constant as well. It can make bloggers question the point of blogging, if nobody is reading their blog. And a lot of bloggers will quit. It happens all the time, but I’d be willing to bet that the retirement of blogs peaks during summer. Bloggers have lives to live too. If the readership isn’t rewarding, it can be quite an easy decision.

The big bloggers see the same trends. The web site traffic at Eschaton in June 2005 was approximately half of his traffic in October of 2004. His traffic in July, at this point, appears to be on its way to being less than June. The percentages are even more of a drop off for Instapundit. It happens to everybody.

So… if you like blogging, don’t let your summer numbers worry you. Blog a little less, live a little more, but don’t let the drop off in traffic depress you from blogging. September and October are right around the corner, and like the swallows of Capistrano, the eyeballs will be back.